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Is He into Me, or Does He Genuinely Want to Hear More About My Thesis on 1600s Slavic Literature?

Is that the look of a man who wants my body or my bibliography?

Whenever I bump into this cute junior in the Dunster dining hall, he asks me about the thesis research that I conducted in Bulgarian archives over winter break. My friends and I can’t figure it out: Is he into me, or does he genuinely want to hear more about my thesis on transgressive agency and aesthetic tension in 1600s Slavic literature?

On the one hand, he must be flirting with me because nobody could possibly give a shit about anyone else's thesis. His repeated texts to me about whether Polish or Serbian syntax more robustly conveys juvenile angst in seventeenth-century Russian texts have got to be a ploy to get in my pants, right? If so, he's onto something—I’ll bang the next man who whispers sweet nothings like “the Hussite revolution was a defining moment in Czech fiction” in my ear.

On the other hand, I feel like he might actually want to know how I am differentiating realism and modernism in Croatian literature because, like, why the hell would he otherwise ask? Perhaps he’s sincerely curious about performativity, heteronormativity, sentimentality, and masculinity in Bosnian prose. In that case, I have some helpful guides to the liminality of infancy in Macedonian poetry that I would be happy to direct him towards.

Does he want to date me or cite me? Who knows. Two can play that game, buddy: Maybe I’m asking about his summer at Morgan Stanley because I give a single fuck about his ambitions in wealth management; maybe I just need a date to the next Quincy formal.